All I have to say… or not say…
Archives for October 2005
New Hire
There’s a new kid in town. Dan has come on board to help us out with beta testing, and will hopefully move to development within a month.
Firefall has been expanding at an extremely rapid pace. When we started up, I had hoped to have a new employee – bringing the total to 4, by new years. At this rate, we will definitely outstrip that goal, most likely hitting 5 by early december.
The reason the expansion is important has to do with the industry we are in. Being primarily a services based company, our income is directly related to the number of manhours we can produce each week. If each employee is paid at a rate of, say, $30/Hr, but is billable at a rate of $60/Hr, that means that after overhead we can expect a profit spillover of around $20-25/Hr. This goes directly into the rainy day fund and to help cover debts.
Mathematically, all this is blatantly obvious. Psychologically, this becomes a fairly big deal. The fact of the matter is that as long as we can bring enough work in, there is direct weekly profit from every persson on board. Recently I’ve been envisioning the company as an engine. The more people we have working at a reasonable rate, the bigger the engine is. And clearly, there is no replacement for displacement.
In any case, welcome, Dan. and remember, resumes are always welcome at [email protected]
New Tool
I recently came across a new way to make posts. I found a OS X 10.4 Dashboard widget called DashBlog. Not that posting was difficult before, but it is a lot faster to pop Dashboard open instead of logging into Blogger, sending an e-mail, or waiting for some other application to load.
My only regret with using DashBlog is the inability to preview my posts. It’s not that I’m prone to making mistakes in my HTML tags, it’s that I always seem to foul something else up. I guess I’ll see over time how well it works.
My name is Jon….
My name is Jon. I work for Firefall and nobody loves me.
I know that no one here loves me for two reasons. First, whenever it is time for lunch everyone goes out without me. Usually to McDonalds, but recently they have discovered a BBQ restaurant serving delectable meats smothered in spicy sauces. I have not been invited. I am the only African American male in this office and I am being denied pork and beef. Nobody loves me.
Second, this past weekend my moral standards were wickedly corrupted as I succumbed to the dancing Mohito. First there was a glass. One which I finished and swore to be my last drink of the evening. Then there was another dancing Mohito. When they dance you have to drink them…it would be rude to do otherwise. Then there was a dancing pitcher. Then there was a dancing restaurant. Nobody loves me.
Stub
The main site is now a stub, instead of a block of text describing my abysmal neglect of the website. Neglect on the order of no less than 4 years.
Granted this change isn’t a world of improvement, but it’s something. Most importantly it shows our new logo (feedback is welcome). It also provides much needed links back to here, our brochure, and gallery.
All this, and we now have a favicon. Which may or may not show up for you now or later. They whole business of them is sketchy at best, but if you happen to catch it, cookie for you.
Paths are Important
I didn’t realize till today that I forgot to change the path that Blogger uses to post the archive and RSS feed. I think the archive still worked, but not the feed. This all started when I initially configured Blogger to have root FTP access. I set all the paths accordingly and then when it came time to creating a new FTP account for Blogger to use, I decided to limit it to a specific subdirectory. Needless to say, I only went back and changed some of the path settings.
Anyway, I doubt anyone noticed, but the RSS feed works now. I hope you’re happy.
Yuengling Sighting in NYC
It may be due to my ignorance, but I was almost certain that it was impossible to find Yuengling outside of PA. That was until it drove past me on 3rd Ave yesterday. My first instinct was to run after the truck and see if I could order a case, but then I realized I’d have to carry it or drink it on the sidewalk. No one was around to help, and the truck was now more then a block away.
I hope I see it again sometime, possibly in a bar, or in my hands. Either way I have renewed hope. Maybe Aniel will finally be able to get his medicine here instead of having to going back to Philadelphia.
To The Roof
There is always something to be learned, especially about a $27.00 R/C airplane. One of the first things to note is that even though they claim you can fly it indoors, they most certainly mean in a gym or some other impossibly large enclosed space. The hope of a whisper quiet motor was replaced by the realization that it sounded more like a Dremel with styrofoam wings. So much for the element of surprise.
When I first saw it mentioned on SlickDeals I immediately envisioned the plane taking off from my desk, making a sharp u-turn and slamming into Aniel’s head. How wrong I was. I couldn’t even get the plane to fly straight down the hall without it flying into things at a seemingly high speed. Being constructed mostly out of styrofoam and other easily destroyed materials, we decided our only hope to fly this was, well, on the roof.
It was raining outside. We tried anyway. Electronics paired with water is always a tempting combination, and fortunately did not damage the plane permanently. Having little success and mounting fears of lasting damage we decided to wait for a better time to try to fly. A better time, equated to no rain, sometime later on that evening, after sundown.
Back on the roof the plane flew a little better, still just in a strait line. So we took turns trying to tame the beast, getting it to turn and not slam into obstacles that the roof presented us. Jon, who has an [expired] pilots license, decided to give it a try…
We looked everywhere for the plane. There was little else for it to have gone other then the street, after Jon briefly touched it down on the edge of the roof. I figured it might have survived the 12 story fall, or that maybe I’d get to see it reduced to a thin slime by a passing truck. Either option seemed like it would provide some form of satisfaction, had we found it.
I still have the remote as a reminder, either to buy better toys, or prohibit Jon from flying them. In the end the plane didn’t fair much better then Aniel’s ill fated helicopter.
